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<p>This dissertation explores the meaning and importance of migration and home for
the Christian Life in the context of modernity and the colonial history of the Americas.
In doing so, it offers a constructive theological proposal that addresses two interrelated
questions. First, what does a truly flourishing human life look like in view of the
realities of migration and home? That is to say, how are migration and home aspects
of God's created order that are deformed by human sinfulness yet still caught up in
the eschatological renewal of all things? Second, can Christianity, despite its role
in the colonization of the Americas, offer a vision of migration and home that leads
to the flourishing of all creatures? This dissertation addresses these questions by
locating the realities and experiences of migration and home within the Triune drama
of God's creative, reconciling, and redemptive work as enacted within the story of
the Americas—its peoples, lands, and cultures, from the moment of colonization up
to our current modern moment.This study makes a methodological contribution to the
fields of Reformed and Latinx theology by engaging in a mode of ressourcement from
the margins. In dialogue with the works of Karl Barth, George Tinker, Willie Jennings,
and Latinx theologians, like Virgilio Elizondo and Ada María Isasi-Díaz, I demonstrate
how Christianity's eschatological vision of all creation joined together in Christ
by the Spirit provides an alternative to a colonial and modern vision of home grounded
in the commodification of the land, the destruction of native cultures, and the segregation
of peoples into racial and national enclosures. Moreover, I argue that the Virgin's
appearance to Juan Diego at Tepeyac, Mexico in 1531 summons the Church to look for
God's redemptive homecoming at the margins of society where the political, economic,
and socio-cultural negotiations that displaced peoples make in order to make a home
in the world become the site of the Spirit's reconciling and redeeming work in creation.
The final chapter provides a theological account of what sociologist Paolo Boccagni
describes as the "migration-home nexus" by arguing that a flourishing human life takes
place at the nexus of migration and home and the forms of political, economic, and
cultural negotiations and mestizaje that this nexus produces. I argue that through
these, the Spirit works to transform creation into the eternal home of God. I conclude
by drawing on the notion of ‘transplantation’ to describe wise ways of migrating and
homing in anticipation of the Triune God's redemptive homecoming.
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